And found herself standing free in the doorway of the locker, facing Don Simon over the collapsing body of the Slovene.
The vampire stepped past her without a word. The canvas bundle for which Lydia had been reaching flinched from Don Simon’s touch with a cry.
‘It’s all right,’ whispered Lydia. ‘Dir wird es … es …’
Don Simon pulled the canvas aside and the girl Ariane stared up at him, face streaked with tears of terror. The vampire put a hand on her shoulder and said something; Lydia didn’t hear what it was. But the tension vanished immediately from Ariane’s body, and she began to weep. ‘Get the knife,’ said Simon, and Lydia, looking around on the floor near Vodusek’s unmoving – but still breathing – body, found the bloodstained weapon.
‘Heller …’ she gasped, and Simon slid past her with the bony agility of a ghost. Lydia cut away the cords that bound Ariane’s wrists, and the girl sat up, tears streaming down her face, and grabbed Lydia in a desperate clutch.
Behind her, Lydia heard Heller say, ‘Who are you?’
And in German, Don Simon replied, ‘A friend of Mistress Asher’s.’
Turning her head, Lydia saw Heller in the light of the gangway well, face bruised and blood trickling from his slashed side. Don Simon was helping him to his feet, calm, aloof, and absolutely human-looking, as he had planned to face Captain Palfrey. It must be midnight …
Shouting in the hall. Slavik’s nasal voice, and Father Kirn’s. Others, baying like wolves – Heller turned and yelled over his shoulder, ‘She’s here!’ Or at least, Lydia guessed that’s what he yelled, in Slovenian, because in the confusion of shouts that followed, as the information was relayed, she caught ‘Sie ist da!’ and ‘Lei è li!’ and people came cramming and shoving into the space around the stairs.
Ariane scrambled to her feet, flew toward them, some men grabbing her in a desperate embrace and others gripping Vodusek, who had staggered up and attempted to flee. Ariane was sobbing, pointing …
Heller cried out something and dove into the locker past Lydia, snatching from one of the shelves a pair of gold pince-nez – Goldhirsch’s, Lydia realized. He held them up and shouted, and Vodusek, catching a knife from one of the men holding him, slashed at that man – even in the heat of the moment Lydia wasn’t sure what he thought he could accomplish by flight. She and Heller were thrust deeper into the locker by the sheer weight of bodies pressing into the gangway well, shouting, furious as Ariane pointed at Vodusek, while her weeping mother held her tight.
‘Assassino!’ screamed a woman – poor little Luzia’s mother – and threw herself at Vodusek, clawing his face as if she’d have torn out his remaining eye. ‘Assassino—!’
Then the deck beneath Lydia’s feet lurched, the walls shuddered like shaken tin, and far off a heavy, splintering boom rocked the ship to its bones.
TWENTY-FOUR
Oh, dear God, we’ve been hit!
Screaming, shoving, swaying.
Heller thrust Lydia deeper into the locker and pushed himself into the doorway, yelling at the same time – first in German and then in Slovenian – ‘Stand still! Stand still!’
The noise outside in the metal-walled gangway well was deafening. People pushing, thrusting, trampling …
Lydia’s mind was blank with horror. Torpedo – I have to get to Miranda!
Oh please God don’t let the lights go out …
She was suddenly aware of Don Simon in the locker beside her, miraculously unruffled. Dear God, if it passes midnight and everyone here sees him as he is …
Then, louder than the clamor of terror and panic, she heard a man scream in the midst of the crowd, and as people started to pour up the stairs, and away in the direction of the deck well and the wider stair beyond, she saw the trampled bodies, not only of Vodusek, but of Slavik as well, crumpled on the floor in a widening pool of blood.
She’d seen worse at the Front. The knowledge of what Vodusek had considered he was entitled to do, in order to recover his money from a Jew, killed whatever sympathy or shock she might have felt. Nevertheless, the sight made her ill. She had no idea whether Slavik had known anything about his friend’s scheme or not.
There are two of them, Izora had said.
Had she meant Don Simon and Vodusek? Or Vodusek and Slavik?
Light-headedness made her suddenly breathless and looking at Don Simon beside her, she saw that his right hand was covered with blood where it pressed her shoulder.
Vodusek. Vodusek stabbed me …
We’ve been hit …
She looked up and met the vampire’s eyes, over his dripping hand. With quiet deliberation, he took a rag from the shelf behind him, and wiped the blood away. With another – clean and rough and smelling sourly of disinfectant – he made a pad which he bound over the wound, his face expressionless.
‘The ship isn’t listing,’ he pointed out in his soft voice as he worked. His glance went to Heller. ‘How long does it take, once a ship has been hit?’
‘Minutes,’ said the German, and put his hand on the knot of bandage so the vampire could double it. ‘Less.’ Heller was looking at Don Simon, squinting as if he struggled to see something that he couldn’t quite make out. He put out a hand, touched the wall. ‘The engines have stopped …’
‘Miranda.’ Lydia was astonished at how calm she sounded. ‘I need to get to Miranda.’
‘I’ll take her,’ said Simon. ‘Find out what you can, if you would, Herr Heller. Myself, I think it sabotage, not enemy attack.’
Heller hesitated, straining to listen – but, Lydia reflected, probably feeling, with the trained senses of a sailor, whether the deck beneath their feet was still level (and it certainly felt level to her).
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Rumor. I was telling Madame of it, when la niña came up to us. Will you do that?’
‘He was,’ affirmed Lydia. ‘And I was telling him it was a ridiculous idea, because who aboard would be that … that silly …’
‘You have been at the Front, Comrade.’ Heller turned from his watchful perusal of the now-empty gangway well to meet her gaze, and saluted her ironically. ‘I should think that any doubts you ever had about the depth of human stupidity should by this time have been resolved.’ His eyes returned to Don Simon, and Lydia saw them widen with shock.
Midnight must be past …
Don Simon asked softly, ‘Will you bring us word?’
Suddenly white under his tan, Heller replied, ‘I shall.’ First things first, reflected Lydia, but she saw the German look over his shoulder twice, as he strode away across the gangway well toward the engine room, his boots tracking in Vodusek’s blood.
Lydia and Don Simon joined the streams of Third Class passengers pouring up the gangways, women and children too frightened to notice anyone around them, even a woman with blood on her dress and a vampire with a face like a scarred skull. The corridors picked up shouting, furious now, the howling of a mob in full cry – Don’t tell me that wretch Vodusek has managed to convince them poor Mr Goldhirsch caused this. The echoes went right through her head.
‘I thought you said Kimball and his idiots were told to … to cripple the engines, not blow up the ship!’
‘Of a certainty they were, Mistress,’ returned the vampire. By the tilt of his head, she could see he was listening to the distant uproar. ‘And I am as certain that when they could make nothing of the instructions they were given, one or the other of them manufactured a simple pipe bomb. Such things are easy enough to make, and God knows they were carrying sufficient ammunition in their luggage. They could have sneaked it into some corner of the engine room while the engineers were, perhaps, helping in the hunt for the missing señorita. Successfully,’ he added, as they approached the gateway that led to the upper decks. ‘There is no list to the boat.’
They were densely mashed into the moving stream of emigrants, as it paused, then proceeded, then paused on its way to the open gateway.
Dizziness swamped
her again. We’ll never be able to get clear if something happens …
‘Neither do I hear nor feel the change in the air that speaks of water rushing in.’
His soft voice calmed her, and to the eternal credit of Captain Winstanley, the grilles that were ordinarily locked across the gangways to Second Class stood open. Stewards had been posted beside them, reassuring those who passed through that: ‘We have no reason to think we have been hit’ in an assortment of mispronounced European languages, and directing people to the Boat Deck just in case. Over the heads of the crowd, Lydia could see the tall, stooped form of Mr Goldhirsch, holding his grandson in his arms and clutching a heavy portmanteau.
Lydia gritted through her teeth, ‘I should think Mr Cochran’s going to kill them—’
But she was wrong about that.
Barely had she and her companion reached the private Promenade, when a thunderous roar of voices burst from the deck well over which it looked. Turning back, Lydia saw a man thrust his way past the grille, and run, stumbling, toward the gangway, the stewards half-heartedly trying to catch him, then making a futile attempt to stop the mob that spurted like poisoned lava from the gateway and poured at his heels. She recognized Mr Kimball as he scrambled, slipping and stumbling, up the gangway toward the Promenade. His jacket had been torn off him and there was blood and engine grease on his face and shirt. She was too far to see his eyes, or hear his breath, but it was as if she were next to him: she knew his eyes were blank with terror for his life, knew his breath was a hoarse gasp of despair.
He was fast for so big a man, but the mob was faster. He hurled aside the steward who’d been assigned to keep unauthorized people off the private Promenade, and if the man had had any notion of trying to stop the pursuers, he gave it up at once. Simon drew Lydia back out of the way as Kimball bolted up onto the Promenade. The American’s screams of: ‘Boss! Boss!’ were drowned by the howling of the mob: Swabo! Shpion! Saboter!
Austrian! Spy! Saboteur …
The corner of the Promenade hid Cochran’s door from Lydia, but she heard Kimball pounding on it, then as the mob surged nearer jerking the handle and kicking the panels, screaming Cochran’s name.
Then just screaming.
After they killed him, and broke down the door, Lydia heard shots fired, so she knew Cochran had been in his suite. ‘They’ll find your coffin in there,’ she said softly.
Don Simon murmured, ‘Yes.’
She could imagine what they’d make of that. She slipped the satchel from her shoulder, handed Don Simon the syringe, and the ampoule of antivenin. ‘I’ll see what I can salvage, later.’
With lips like iced marble he kissed her hand, and faded into the darkness.
By the time the quartermasters came up to the Promenade – with rifles – the mob had scattered and gone.
Somewhere in the Stygian bowels of the old gypsum mines that lay beneath Paris, there was a cell whose bars were plated with silver. Asher recognized it, from the days he had spent there after being almost killed by the Paris nest. He assumed it lay somewhere near the Hotel Montadour, and guessed it had been installed by one of the earlier Masters of Paris – the Masters of Paris, he had gathered, had for three hundred years had trouble controlling their fledglings.
‘I regret –’ Szgedny dumped Augustin’s limp body inside and locked the door, carefully wrapping his hands in a mangy carriage rug – brought from the Peugeot – against the touch of the bars – ‘that there are not two such cages. You should be safe enough. Few of Elysée’s get remain in the city.’
The cell was indeed a sort of cage, set within a larger cavern: cold, damp, pitch-black and smelling of the sewers and the river. They had left the Peugeot in the Place Denfert-Rochereau and descended through the Catacombs, turning aside from those endless tunnels walled in bones into one of the side corridors nominally blocked off with sawhorses. The walls, as Asher had observed on previous occasions, were marked with chalk signs of various ages. Communards had hidden in these tunnels, in the days of the siege of ’71; quite possibly refugees from the Terror eighty years before that. The Master of Prague had brought a bullseye lantern from the motorcar as well as the carriage rug. Even with the bloodstained German greatcoat, Asher knew he was in for a miserably cold day.
‘Sleep if thou canst, Anglus.’ The Graf set down the lantern. ‘I do not know this city well enough, to send someone here to you with water and food. Don’t try to search for a way out yourself.’
He straightened, and with a fragment of chalk from his pocket made a sign on the wet stone of the wall. ‘There are three hundred miles of tunnels, perhaps more, and I have no desire to spend the first three-quarters of the night searching them for you.’
Asher said, ‘I’m grateful,’ though he wondered how many of Elysée’s beautiful fledglings actually were hiding down there, and whether they were earlier risers than the Graf. He also wondered where the nobleman meant to sleep. When Augustin had stopped, halfway along the narrow seam in the rock, leaned against the wall and then suddenly collapsed into the unwakeable sleep to which the Undead were prey in daytime, he had feared that Szgedny would likewise drop unconscious. He knew it must be almost light, above ground.
But the Graf had lifted the younger vampire with effortless strength onto his shoulder, and continued to this place deep in the belly of the darkness. In addition to the mines, and the vast silent boneyard of the Catacombs themselves, Asher knew that there were a hundred hidden doorways where cellars, church crypts, forgotten vaults and communication tunnels from the sewers gave ingress to the black rock seams. Though the Graf might not have living servants in Paris, three hundred years was presumably plenty of time even for a stranger to the city to learn the maze well. A similar network of underground passageways and rooms – though not nearly so extensive – existed in Prague, though the Prague vampires avoided such places because of the other things which haunted them.
As he lay down, Asher wondered whether Joël had followed them back. Or had the little fledgling found refuge somewhere near the Front, in a caved-in wine-cellar or the sub-crypt of some old monastery, before going out again tonight when it grew dark, to feast on men dying in shell holes. Men slain not by the Undead, but by their living brothers.
He felt little fear of Joël, even if he had returned to Paris. As to what else might be down here …
Elysée had said nothing of such matters. But then, the Master of Paris herself might not know.
Asher slept lightly, exhausted though he was. His memories of Paris underground were foul, and he woke, half a dozen times, always in total darkness, dreaming sometimes that he was back in one of the dugouts on the Western Front – terrified that the trench had been undermined by enemy sappers, or that there had been a near-direct hit by a shell, and that he’d been buried alive, with the maggots and the rats. Sometimes he dreamed that he was on board the City of Gold, that she’d been torpedoed. The electrical plant had flooded as she began to go down and he was slipping, fighting for balance on slanted decks through utter darkness, searching for Lydia. Feeling the ice-cold water around his knees and knowing that in minutes the ship was going to begin its long fall to the bottom, carrying him trapped in darkness with it.
Once he jerked from sleep convinced there was someone – something – in the dank rock-cut room with him. He had dreamed of her – he knew it was a her … Elysée? Someone who stood beside him for a long time, looking down at him. When he woke and groped for the lantern he found that it had been moved, and it seemed to him that in the darkness he could smell, faint and elusive, the whiff of expensive perfume mixed with blood.
It was a long time before he dared grope about him for the lantern – it was not, in fact, very far off. Longer still, before he lay down again.
TWENTY-FIVE
‘How dare Captain Winstanley confine us to our cabins?’ demanded Aunt Louise, her face blotched red with outrage at the steward who had been stationed on the Promenade and who had firmly escorted her back w
hen she’d attempted to ‘learn what on earth was going on.’ ‘How dare he?’
Lydia, emerging from her bedroom where Miranda lay sleeping – finally – crossed to the table where Mrs Flasket had laid out tea. The level of the amber liquid, when she poured it out steaming, was perfectly aligned with the rim of the Wedgwood cup – the same cup that Aunt Louise had served her from less than a week previously at Mountjoy House in London. Dimly, from the Promenade outside, she heard the steward posted there – ostensibly to keep intruders from the elite suites – saying, ‘I’ve seen Lady Mountjoy and Mrs Asher myself, Your Majesty, and they’re fine. But please, the captain has asked that everyone stay indoors until we’ve secured the ship.’
‘We could be sinking for all he knows!’ declared Aunt Louise. ‘We might all be in danger of our lives!’
Lydia walked to the window, looked out at the black sea horizon outlined by the silver line of the westering moon. ‘We don’t seem to be any lower in the water than we were twenty minutes ago,’ she pointed out. That was the first thing she’d showed Miranda, when Mrs Frush had carried the child down from the boat deck and Lydia, who’d been watching the gangway, had intercepted them and brought them to the suite: ‘See, darling,’ she had said, ‘the horizon is just the same place – right below the deck-rail – that it was a few minutes ago. That means we’re not going down.’
‘We didn’t get torpedoed?’ had asked the little girl in visible disappointment.
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ she had replied, at which Mrs Frush had pronounced a little homily about their escape from danger.
Not, reflected Lydia, that they were out of danger yet, or anywhere near it.
They have to know we’re here. They have to be on their way.
Mrs Frush, Honoria Flasket, Ellen, Malkin, old Mr Mortling and even little Miss Prebble, were in the suite’s kitchen now, drinking their own cups of tea (second-class American Line’s china, not Wedgwood) and speculating about what could have caused first the explosion below decks, and then the irruption of a shouting, cursing mob into the most elite portion of the ship. When Lydia had passed the door of the kitchen she had heard Mrs Frush’s deep Scots voice predicting that they would all be murdered in their beds, and that she would never travel on an American vessel again.
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